Sister Noon (31 page)

None of this went as she’d planned. Mrs. Bell opened with one of her startling conversational gambits; there was no recovery. “There are those wish to kill me,” she said, but
calmly. “Those who’ve already tried. No one is to get through the door when Mrs. Pleasant is out. Yet in you waltz.”

“Your butler did attempt to stop me,” Lizzie confessed. “I was persistent.”

“Billy?” Mrs. Bell sighed impatiently. “I said it to Mrs. Pleasant, so now we’ve a blind man guarding the door. You think a killer won’t be persistent? A reporter? My mother? A woman come here once, claimed our Muriel had been kicked in the head by a horse. Near to dying. Slid upstairs, smooth as honey while we were all wringing our hands and carrying on. She was going through my desk when Muriel walked in, fit as ever could be.”

“How awful.”

“Reporters are lower than lice. I can’t offer you coffee. I can ring and ring, without anyone coming. When Mrs. P is out, the servants do as they please. Won’t even protect me.”

“Do you know when Mrs. Pleasant will be back? I really must talk with her.”

Mrs. Bell smiled slyly. The tips of her perfect teeth rested on her full bottom lip. “You better not. You better go before she comes. She don’t want surprises.”

“It’s too important.”

As always, Mrs. Bell picked up Lizzie’s hands. The room was cold and Mrs. Bell’s hands colder. Lizzie’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark. On the wall was a picture of two cherubs eating sponge cake. It was sweet and sentimental, something Lizzie’s mother would have liked. Here, it didn’t go with the statuary.

“All Mrs. Pleasant’s business is important,” Mrs. Bell said. “She’s out on important business now. The city would fall without her.”

“Do you remember telling me about one of her parties?” Lizzie began, but Mrs. Bell was still talking and didn’t stop to listen.

“I used to have such queer fancies as a child,” she said. “Voices in the wind and water. When I was three months old my mother undressed me and put me on a windowsill in an ice storm. She was a tiger-heart. Might still be looking for me, for all I know. She killed my two brothers.”

“I have a dead brother, too,” Lizzie offered. “He died when he was a baby.”

Mrs. Bell dismissed this. She released Lizzie’s hands, lifted the embroidery hoop, and began to pick at it with the needle. She worked a purple thread loose, which grew longer and longer while the half-formed violet disappeared. “If your mother didn’t kill him, then you don’t know what I’m saying.”

“But I used to have queer fancies about him,” Lizzie insisted. Used to, as if she didn’t still, nearly every day. Who was she to think Mrs. Bell odd? She meant to be congenial, but Mrs. Bell didn’t like it.

“Do you ever think you’re not real?” Now it was a competition.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m reading a book and when it ends I believe in the characters more than myself. It doesn’t last very long, but I know the sensation.”

Mrs. Bell shook her head. “You don’t know anything. What I’m saying is, maybe I was supposed to die when I was three months old. That’s why I’ve made no mark. The servants don’t notice me. I’ve nothing that’s my own.”

“You have a husband and children,” Lizzie said. “I wish I had so much as you.”

“All I have is six hundred acres in upper New York.”

A feeling had been growing over Lizzie during this exchange. It rose from the unvarying at-homes of Mrs. Putnam, the endless circling of Mrs. Wright’s memories, but it was strongest with Mrs. Bell in the House of Mystery. These were women under glass. Time had stopped.

Lizzie remembered again, but claustrophobically, her father’s story of Dr. Toland’s dead wife in her glass-topped coffin. What a good idea, in case you weren’t quite dead yet, to leave a window through which you could get someone’s attention. “We don’t have to be the same person our whole lives,” Lizzie said desperately, and then the clock in the hallway struck and the spell was broken.

Mrs. Bell seemed to come to herself, set the embroidery down, patted her hair. “You can probably catch Mrs. Pleasant at the mission,” she suggested politely. “She’s got another charity case out that way, some family she’s feeding. But she likes the mission, she’ll probably stop in after. That woman does love a graveyard. She has one of her own, you know. You can imagine how convenient that’s been over the years.”

They heard the front door open, boots stamping, the voice of a young man calling out. “Mother! Mother!”

Mrs. Bell was on her feet, moving more quickly than Lizzie had thought her capable, and speaking more loudly. “You don’t be coming here, Fred! Billy! Billy! Fred’s trying to get in!”

Clearly, Lizzie’s interview with her had come to an end.

a
ccording to some, Mr. Bell and Mrs. Pleasant were very much in love. They built the House of Mystery to live in together after her husband (and daughter) had died of diseases caused by excessive drink. They mixed assets freely and, after his marriage to Teresa, deeded properties over to her as well. The Bell and Pleasant finances were a Gordian knot no lawyer was ever able to loosen, though for more than thirty years countless numbers of them tried.

In this version of the household, Thomas Bell’s marriage to Teresa was something he was tricked into while drunk, “bibulous” being the adjective most frequently assigned him. During the various estate cases, servants testified that the Octavia Street house was a divided one, quite literally. Mrs. Bell was not to enter Mr. Bell’s half. He
would not enter hers. Nor would he ever speak to her. Any communication was to go through Mrs. Pleasant. Mrs. Pleasant and Mrs. Bell, however, were conceded to be very fond of each other.

Yet there were those eight children (two of them dead). Not a one of them hers, Teresa said. Mr. Bell had paid her fifty thousand dollars a child, so Mrs. Pleasant had produced one whenever the women were short of cash.

Thomas Bell died in 1892. Suffering from a flu, he rose in the night, lost his way, and fell into the well of the spiral staircase. “Where am I?” the servants said they heard him cry out.

Mrs. Bell was in Glen Ellen at the time, on the Beltane ranch owned by Mrs. Pleasant. Teresa recorded the death in her diary: “Oct. 16 telegraph from S.F. 10:30 about Mr. Bell. Took two Gal Red Wine to Officer for [word indecipherable] Mrs. Bell [a nephew’s wife] and Mrs. Gordon go to town. Telegraph to Mammy 25ck [name indecipherable] 1 gal wine J Bergman 1 gal wine 2 o’clock Mr. Bell died.”

On the day after his death, Mrs. Bell shipped two barrels of apples and one package of cheesecloth, paid some bills, and had some horses shod.

The will was contested by Fred, the oldest boy. He claimed that his mother, the executrix, was incompetent, because she was under the sway of her housekeeper. The court eventually agreed. Judge Coffey ruled that Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Pleasant’s relationship was an inappropriate one for a white woman and a colored woman to have. Mrs. Pleasant’s influence in the Bell household was unnatural, and illegal as well.

Ironically, the friendship had worsened by this time.
In 1902, after a noisy row during which the police were called, Mrs. Bell had Mrs. Pleasant evicted. “She passed out the door after her two trunks snarling like a mad dog,” Mrs. Bell wrote in her diary. While Mrs. Pleasant said, “I am glad, very glad to go.”

That same year, Mrs. Pleasant published the first chapter of her memoirs. Included was an analysis of her palm—the palmist H. Jerome Fosselli said she showed a “marvelous ability to read motives”—and also the startling assertion that she had never been a slave. She was born in 1814 in Philadelphia. Her father was an importer of silks, a native Kanaka named Louis Alexander Williams. Her mother was a free “full blooded Louisiana negress.”

A dispute with the editor prevented the promised second installment. Mrs. Pleasant died in 1903.

Teresa Bell died in 1923, leaving an estate whose estimated value was $938,000. Before her death, she’d accused Mary Ellen Pleasant of having murdered an employee named Sam Whittington many years before, and also of killing Thomas Bell by pushing him over the stairs, possibly with Fred Bell’s help. She’d accused Fred of murdering two wives. She’d accused Marie Bell’s husband, Arthur Holman, of murdering Marie. She’d accused her mother of murdering her brothers. Her estate, which left nothing to either Clingans or Bells, was immediately contested by both families on grounds of insanity.

None of the large San Francisco estates seems to have passed without objection from one generation to the next, but the Bell estate is the standard by which all others are measured. Every case from 1897 to 1926 was as bad as the Bell business or it wasn’t. John Bell, Thomas Bell’s
supposed nephew, made a claim, as did Viola Smith, as did the Clingan sisters. Decisions were made, appealed, reversed. The case went to the state supreme court.

In May of 1926, litigation ended in a compromise. Of the total, $370,000 went to the surviving Bell children, after they had pledged $100,000 to charity and made a settlement to Viola Smith of close to the same.

Maybe:

Fred Bell was the son of May Thompson and a gambler named Bill Thompson.

Marie was the daughter of May Thompson and Dr. Monser, the abortionist who died in San Quentin.

Robina was the child of Sarah Althea Hill and Reuben Lloyd, a prominent city attorney.

Reginald or possibly Muriel was William Sharon’s child by Bertha Barnson (or maybe Bonstell), a maid at the Palace.

Eustace was born to “one of the Harris girls.”

Or:

They were all, as they themselves claimed, the children of Thomas and Teresa Bell.

Reginald Bell gave the following statement to the
San Francisco Examiner:
“We always called her [Teresa Bell] mother and she was a good mother to us. Mammy Pleasant was a wonderful woman, but there was nothing mysterious about her and there was really no reason why the home should have been called the House of Mystery.”

B
ack in April 1890, Lizzie waited at the mission. Sunlight came dimly through the yellow glass of the small windows, so the room was lit with a golden daytime dusk, but there was little heat. The sky was a ceiling striped with Indian dyes. The ground was worn tile. At the far end of the adobe room the altar glittered. This place never seemed to change. The city grew in all directions, but here was its eternal, damp, still-beating Spanish Catholic heart.

To Lizzie’s New World Episcopalian sensibilities, the room had a thrilling aura of overexcitement. Saint Ann clasped her hands together pleadingly. The Archangel Michael was dressed like a Spanish
grande.
Publicly, Lizzie disapproved of a religion that covered itself in thin gold leaf. It recalled the gorgeous medieval excesses of popery.
Privately, if there’d been no one to see her, she would have fallen to her knees.

She sat on the hard pews in the cold cave of the church, wondering how long she would wait. On the wall to her right was a painting of the Last Supper. This suited Lizzie, whose mind was very much on betrayal. The waiting seemed a lenient penance. And better to find Mrs. Pleasant here than have to return again to the still, clogged air of the House of Mystery.

Mrs. Pleasant entered an hour or so later. She did not seem surprised to see Lizzie, though, to Lizzie’s chagrin, she did seem pleased. “I didn’t know you were Catholic,” she said. She crossed herself quickly and gestured for Lizzie to come outside. She wore a purple bonnet with a wide brim, and was wrapped in a purple shawl.

They went to the little graveyard, a garden of blackberries, brambles, and slabs. Mrs. Pleasant stooped over a marker. J Sparrow, whose epitaph was caught in a cage of twisted wrought iron. “There are three vigilante graves around here,” Mrs. Pleasant said. “James Sullivan, Charles Cora, and James Casey. Only I can’t remember right where. And any number of Indians. No stones for the hundreds of them.”

Mrs. Pleasant sighed. “When you get to my age you’ll find things that happened forty years ago are more clear than yesterday’s doings. Part of my mind is always in those splendid, dreadful years.” She shook her head, then straightened, brightened, and began to walk again. “Isn’t this a lovely spot, though? Nothing like the company of the dead when you need a bit of peace and quiet.”

This had never been Lizzie’s experience. “I’m even sorrier, then, to intrude on your peaceful time here,” she said.

“Have you ever given thought to your epitaph?”

“No.”

“No,” repeated Mrs. Pleasant. “Of course, you’re far too young. I’ve picked out mine. Known it for years.”

“What will it be?” Lizzie was genuinely curious. How could such a long and tumultuous history be encapsulated on a single stone? “‘She was a friend to John Brown,’” Mrs. Pleasant said. “That’s what I’d like.”

“I have something very difficult to say to you,” Lizzie told her.

They’d reached the obelisk of Don Luis Antonio Arguello. Mrs. Pleasant paused to admire it. “Then just open your mouth and let it come,” she suggested.

Lizzie took a breath. Sunlight dappled the leaves, twirled warningly in the wind. Something was corking her throat. She spoke anyway. “It’s my fault that Miss Viola was snooping last night. I put her up to it. Please don’t hold her responsible, since it’s all my fault. I’m more sorry than I can say.”